Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
🧠 To solve ✅ To end well 🏋️ To exercise 🧮 To calculate
to work out

to work out

155 2.0
To exercise to improve your health
  • phrasal verb
  • /wɜrk aʊt/
translation icon : hacer ejercicio
  • To improve her overall health, she tries to work out at the gym three times a week.
  • work out at the gym

Like eat with me and let's work out together at my pace.

Autoplay Next

Examples

  • After several months, he began to work out in the gym.

    Academic text (1993)

  • So now I go and work out twice a week.

  • Look, every time I start working out really hard, I always get hurt.

    Andrew Huberman

  • I just came here to work out.

    Dis/Informed (2021)

  • How often do you work out? - Three, four times a week.

    Sliver (1993)

  • I'm going to work out.

    Ficciones (2021)

  • I'm working out with my dad!

    Unbreakable (2000)

  • A personal trainer was available, but Leon preferred to work out using his own routine.

    Fiction book (1998)

  • You don't have to work out two hours a day or join the soccer league to enjoy feeling strong.

    Academic text (2018)

  • She was teaching moms how to work out with their kids.

Synonyms

to train
vsto work out
442 1.0

To exercise to get ready for a sport or event

aims mainly at improving health and fitness rather than sport skills
to exercise
vsto work out
114 1.0

Do physical activity to make your body stronger and healthier

focuses on improving health through general bodily activity
to hit the gym
vsto work out
  • Informal
8 3.6

To go to the gym to exercise

can be done anywhere, not only at a fitness center

Antonyms

neglect
100 3.5

Not caring for someone or something that needs care

How Intense

to train
442 1.0
to work out
155 2.0
to stretch
185 1.5

Surface Forms

work out infinitive
worked out past
worked out past participle
working out present participle
works out third person singular

Morphology

work + out

The sense 'to exercise' is plausibly connected to 'work' (physical effort) with the particle 'out' adding a sense of exertion or completion, so a learner who knows the constituents could reasonably infer a gym/exercise meaning. However, 'work out' is a polysemous phrasal verb (also meaning 'solve' or 'turn out well') and the exact gym-specific reading is not strictly compositional or universally mirrored across languages, making the connection only partially predictable.

Etymology

Work out for exercise comes from making your body 'work' so muscles get used and become stronger. So to work out means 'to exercise'.